Common Sense Media

age 18+

Common Sense Says

Classic '70s adventure has brutal, disturbing violence.

What Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Deliverance is a classic 1972 movie based on the James Dickey novel about four Atlanta men who get more than they bargained for on a weekend canoe trip into rural Georgia. There's profanity (including "f--k" and its variations) and drinking and smoking. There's brief nudity (male buttocks). In its most infamous scene, a man is raped by another man and forced to "squeal like a pig" while his friend is tied to a tree. From that moment on, the action is intense and violent, with killings, dead bodies, and gruesome injuries, such as a broken leg in which the bone is sticking through the thigh, and an accidental piercing from an arrow into a man's side. While the intense violence is intended to raise broader points about civilization, survival, man's relation to nature, and the degradation of the environment, as well as what happens when people are reduced to a state of survival, the brutality contained in this movie makes it best for older teens and adults.